http://www.psu.edu/celt/PST/collab1.html

Discussions of collaborative learning and its benefits have become common currency on college campuses. Proponents argue that it promotes active learning, critical thinking, conceptual understanding, long-term retention of material, and high levels of student satisfaction. It also provides opportunities for students in large classes to interact on a smaller scale, and prepares students for the "real world." Clearly, collaborative learning is another useful teaching method that can help teachers and students accomplish specific goals. However, many teachers are unclear as to what precisely is meant by "collaborative learning." Collaborative activities range from small groups of students working together for part of a class period to formal semester-long group projects, with countless variations between these two extremes. But rather than attempt to sort out the nuances of various definitions, it is perhaps more valuable to analyze their shared attributes--attributes that may already exist in your own classroom. Underlying nearly all collaborative learning experiences is a distinctive set of assumptions about what teaching is, what learning is, and what the nature of knowledge is. Perhaps the most pivotal of these is the assumption that knowledge is created through interaction, not transferred from teacher to student. Hence, it typically--and logically--follows that instructional activity must build on students' current levels of background knowledge, experience, and understanding. It also follows that the teacher's role is to create a context in which learners can make the material their own through an active process of discovery. Effective collaborative activities promote individual learning through the group process.

Obviously, in order to meet the conditions of these assumptions, teachers must leave center stage and give up what Jane Tompkins has termed the "performance model" of teaching, wherein classroom activity focuses on showing the students how smart, knowledgeable, and well-prepared the teacher is. In collaborative classrooms, by contrast, what teachers do is by definition subordinate to what students do--interact, discuss, explore and think together. Which is not to say that collaborative teachers never lecture. They may. Nor does it mean they do not prepare. They do. But take a large enough sample of student behavior in collaborative classrooms, and it quickly becomes clear that a significant amount of class time is devoted to interaction and small group activities. Covering material becomes less important than facilitating student mastery and performance.

Many features of what is commonly identified as collaborative learning are also features of what is just plain good teaching. Thus, it is not wholly surprising that, although many faculty make deliberate efforts to include collaborative activities, their emergence is not always the result of conscious design and rarely occurs wholesale. More often, there is a gradual infusion of such activities that is frequently accomplished without fanfare and often is the serendipitous result of other kinds of experimentation. As Claudia A. Limbert (English) comments, "I'm always amazed to learn that collaborative teaching is a fairly new idea when for me it seems to be the only way to teach." And, in fact, collaboration already exists in many Penn State classrooms as open discussion, case study analysis, interdisciplinary and mini-research projects, interactive lectures, study contracts, and team model-building in a wide array of fields as divergent as English and engineering.

Collaboration in the classroom is infinitely adaptable and, consequently, something of a chameleon. It can involve groups of almost any size working on one project together or on several individual projects. It can even be informal study groups that meet periodically, enabling students to study together and learn from each other. Perhaps the most typical form of collaborative activity is formal problem-solving groups or teams, in which students work in groups to complete extended, and often applied, projects. These projects may be used to mimic the kinds of professional collaboration students will encounter as they enter the world of work. For example, Robert Melton (Aerospace Engineering) has upper-division students in his spaceship design course work in teams over two semesters to design space craft. Swamy Anantheswaran (Food Science) has senior-level students work in groups of four to solve real-world problems in food processing, drawing on sources in industry and at Penn State. When all goes well in these kinds of formal assignments, the result is much greater than what individual members of the group could have achieved on their own.

Collaboration can also involve more subtle variations of other teaching methods. One example is the modified lecture, which gets students actively involved in solving problems while still in class and also gives an opportunity to guide student problem solving. Even in very large class sections, faculty often interject a bit of collaborative learning by having students work on a single problem with one another and then discuss their solutions with the class as a whole. Similarly, following in-class demonstrations or experiments, it is often effective to ask students to break into groups to articulate or apply what they have just heard or seen. Or, after students have read about and analyzed a specific concept, you can ask them to explicate how changes in one set of variables affect other variables. For example, "In what ways, if any, would Piaget's theory of cognitive development have been different if he had studied children from non-Western cultures in addition to his own?" Even in fields where consensus is more common, these kinds of activities build confidence and shift focus away from algorithmic attempts to get the answer and onto strategies and heuristics that underlie effective problem solving.

Preparing Effective Collaborative Activities

Collaborative activities require a lot of preparation, largely because teachers can't control the agenda as they can in a lecture. Consequently, they must actually be more facile in dealing with material than if they were just telling students what they should know.

The success of a collaborative activity also depends on the appropriateness of the task that students are asked to perform. Thus, designing an assignment or question is crucial. Ideally, it should be a task for which the collaboration is an essential part of what is being taught. For example, when students work in groups to write research papers, the teaching method is not separate from the content. They are learning not just writing, but collaborative writing, which requires a distinct set of skills.

Similarly, in a geography class, you might teach the issues of water demands in the Southwest by dividing the class into groups and asking each group to take the position of a stakeholder in the Colorado River. The groups could then be charged with the mandate to argue for their group's own enlarged water rights at the expense of others. By neglecting to call on particular groups, such as the Mexicans of Baja, you can illustrate the vagaries and biases of the policy-making process. Thus, in addition to teaching students the procedural aspects of resource planning, this activity actually models the social process of negotiation and allows students to experience it for themselves.

Those teachers at Penn State who have used collaborative learning in their classes generally recommend the following advice for planning a collaborative activity:

Preparation also involves preparing students for what they are expected to do and letting them know what they can expect to get out of the activity. Generally speaking, you probably should not assume students know how to work effectively in groups. Most don't. One young professor, who had had measurable success teaching an upper-level course, attended a national conference on collaborative learning just as he was preparing to teach an introductory course for non-majors for the first time. Still full of inspiration from the conference and fueled by confidence from earlier successes, he entered the course and immediately asked students to work in groups to solve significant theoretical problems. Well over half of the class dropped in the first week, and those who remained grumbled loudly.

Put simply, this was a case of overestimating what students could do. The error was not in what he was trying to do, but in trying to do it too soon and too fast. As this professor discovered, students need to be prepared to perform the kind of work teachers expect from them, and that preparation involves providing guidance on how to work as a group as well as subject matter information. One common obstacle to collaboration is that students have learned in school that individual work is valued, so their idea of learning may include an underlying assumption of competition with other students. After years of acculturation, it can be difficult for students to let go of that competitive attitude and learn to think as members of a team.

Be ready to devote a certain amount of time to helping students overcome these obstacles and develop collaboration skills. For example, when using long-term groups, Robert Melton recommends that the assignments be designed so that they start simple and become progressively more difficult. In his class, the groups start with an interesting open-ended assignment that could be adapted to many different fields: groups of students are given some uncooked spaghetti, masking tape, and 30 minutes to build the tallest free-standing structure they can. This project, although not difficult, gives students the chance to see how others in their group think and work, how team members will interact, and what the group dynamics will be. In other words, to set the stage for collaboration, it is often easiest to begin by minimizing the significance of the initial problem or task. Make it just a bit silly, and students will find it more comfortable to work together rather than compete. The lesson learned is an important one: through collaboration, the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts.

In the following reading, Kathryn Plank reflects on how we measure the "success" of a collaborative activity. Her experience suggests that planning an effective collaborative activity requires a strong sense of the objectives the activity is supposed to help participants achieve.

Commonly Asked Questions about Teaching With Collaborative Activities

How do I decide which assignments/activities to make collaborative?--A good rule of thumb is that if there's no reason for an activity to be collaborative, perhaps it shouldn't be. As you contemplate making a project collaborative, consider these questions: What is the objective or goal of this assignment or activity? How will that objective be furthered by asking students to work in groups? Is this project complex and challenging enough that it would be impossible for an individual student to complete it alone? Will this project require students to synthesize their work in true collaboration, rather than just complete work separately and turn it in together at the end? Collaborative activities, large or small, work best when they draw on the strengths of group interaction--for example, a rough draft workshop in a writing class allows each writer to receive comments from several different readers. In a more long-term collaborative project, such as an engineering senior design project, one of the objectives may be to teach students to draw on the skills and abilities of each member of a team. Engineering students, like students from nearly every discipline, need effective collaboration skills upon graduation if they are to enter the workplace successfully.

How do I divide students into groups?--Once you have decided to use a collaborative activity, one of the first issues you'll face is the composition of the groups. How many students should be in each group? Should you let them choose their teammates, or should you arrange the groups? Should you divide them by ability level? By demographics? To get heterogeneous groups or homogenous groups? Obviously, the answer to all of these questions depends in part on your objectives for the assignment. Group size can range anywhere from two, for an informal problem-solving session in the middle of the class period, to eight, for a semester-long team assignment. In the latter case, the group is large enough that there will probably be subgroups within the group. Karl A. Smith suggests starting out with small groups so that students become accustomed to the different roles necessary for effective groups before moving to larger groups (1). Of course, group size is largely determined by the amount of work the project requires--if the assignment only provides enough work for three people, a group of five will be bored, ineffective, and probably dissatisfied.

Whether or not you let students self-select their groups also depends on your purpose and the type of assignment. For short, informal in-class activities, asking students to turn to a neighbor or a friend may be the quickest and simplest way to divide the class. Even for more formal assignments, some instructors find that letting students form their own groups according to established criteria is a successful practice. Most teachers agree, however, that when you plan an extensive collaborative activity, such as a major class project, it is better for you to arrange the groups. Students who choose to work with friends often have a harder time with group projects than students in groups chosen by the teacher. Arranging the groups yourself allows you to draw on your knowledge of the abilities, interests, and needs of individuals to create increased opportunities for learning.

You can use a variety of criteria for selecting the groups. If you're teaching an upper-division course in the major, for example, where all students share the same background knowledge, you may simply want to make a random selection, or group students with similar areas of interest together. On the other hand, if the goal of the project is for groups to integrate a variety of skills, you may want to sort students so that each group has a mix of background experience, abilities, work styles, and approaches to learning. It is probably best not to group students strictly by ability level, as some diversity generally fosters increased learning among the entire group. In addition, grouping by past performance is difficult because successful collaboration requires different skills from successful individual projects; you may find that students who earn high marks on individual assignments are not the most effective group members in your class.

How can I help students learn to work in groups?--As mentioned above, your students don't necessarily know how to work in groups. After years of working independently and competitively, they may find cooperation and collaboration difficult concepts to accept in an academic setting. They are so accustomed to individual grades that it may not be obvious to them how to work together when their grade depends, in part, on the performance of other students in the class. This lack of preparation may undermine the effectiveness of your collaborative assignment and keep students from meeting the objectives of the project. For example, if each of the four students working together on a newsletter treat the project like an individual assignment rather than synthesizing their efforts, the final product will be disjointed rather than seamless. Moreover, the students in such a group are unlikely to learn how to make effective use of the experience. To prepare them to work together as a team, you might start the group project with team-building activities such as Bob Melton's spaghetti tower, followed by a debriefing or a discussion of the group dynamics that surface during the exercise. These activities help students to recognize each other's strengths and work styles, and make them more aware of the internal resources their group might draw on for a more serious project. Any in-class group activity that requires all the members of the group to work together to achieve a common goal can be used as a starting point for a discussion of group dynamics.

In helping their students learn to work as members of a team, some teachers identify separate roles within effective groups (note-taker, agenda-setter, and so on) and ask each group to divide the roles between the members. Others administer a personality instrument like the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, followed by a session on how each personality type translates to work styles and relationships (2). Karl A. Smith emphasizes the balance between positive interdependence--the idea that no student can succeed without the success of the rest of the group--and individual accountability within groups (3). He encourages teachers to explain these concepts and make expectations and objectives clear from the start of the project. Kris Bosworth writes that most students have the interpersonal skills that are necessary for effective group work, but that they consider these skills social rather than academic. She suggests that teachers identify these social skills and use modeling and other methods to help students bring their interpersonal experience explicitly into the classroom to promote collaborative learning (4). Whatever method they use to bring students together in teams, experienced teachers agree that effective collaborative activities depend on students taking individual responsibility for their work and that of the other members of their group, and using communication and teamwork skills to maintain a productive group relationship.

How can I deal with conflicts within the groups?--The first step is to realize that some conflict is perhaps inevitable--and maybe even desirable. Part of what students are learning in a group project is how to negotiate differences and deal with other people to reach a common goal. Groups sometimes become stronger as they work through the conflicts that arise with the clash of different ideas and work habits. As Miller, Trimbur, and Wilkes point out, "excessive conflict can certainly interfere with performance. Paradoxically, excessive harmony can do the same, because members of the best groups tend to be critical of one another's work or at least to tolerate an in-house critic; they tend also to impose high standards on themselves" (5). Of course, this kind of creative tension doesn't worry most teachers as much as the potential personality conflicts that sometimes cause bitter feelings and unproductive groups.

One of the best ways to deal with such conflicts is to prevent them from happening in the first place. As we have mentioned, some conflict arises out of the fact that students don't necessarily know howto work in groups. After years of developing individual skills in competition, students need to learn how to trust other group members, how to delegate, how to negotiate, and many other team skills. Helping students understand group dynamics can also prevent conflicts. Miller, Trimbur, and Wilkes identify personality characteristics and learning styles as two areas that shape the dynamics of the group, and encourage teachers to accommodate these differences by providing groups with ways of dealing with conflict as it arises. They argue that, although educating students about group process takes class time that might be spent on course content, spending a class period discussing group work skills can make a major difference in the success of the project. "We should teach the skills that we are grading. Thus, such a session should include a briefing on the necessity for and logistics of good communication and organization and give participants an opportunity to discuss the various kinds of talents and individual differences or preferences that different people bring to tasks" (6). They suggest activities such as small groups solving a simple puzzle and reflecting on the group process afterward, students role-playing group interaction and discussing scenarios as a class, or reading and discussing information about the characteristics of different work styles and personality types, and how to accommodate these differences.

No matter how well you prepare, however, variables outside your control ensure that conflicts will sometimes occur. Keeping in touch with the progress of the groups--through periodic progress reports or team assessments, for example--allows you to identify problems within the groups as they arise. If a group is having trouble resolving a problem, you will want to decide how active a role you are willing to take to help your students handle the situation. One strategy is to invite students to your office both individually and as a group to discuss the problem and possible approaches to a solution. During these meetings, you may find that students who are unhappy have not talked to the other members of their group about their dissatisfaction. By acting as a temporary discussion facilitator among the members of the group, you help students develop skills for dealing with confrontation and encourage them to talk with each other about the problems they are having.

Sometimes, students request a change to the group membership. Most teachers experienced in collaborative approaches believe that groups should be changed only in the most extreme cases, when every other avenue for resolution has failed. When students realize that they will not be permitted to change groups easily, they feel more committed to negotiating problems within their groups. Make it clear that you expect groups to work through their differences, and they will be more likely to do so. Making changes to the groups sets the group process back to the beginning, and discards the benefits that have come from early interaction--even if some of that interaction has been confrontational.

How do I grade collaborative work?--Assessment of a collaborative activity is probably the biggest challenge teachers face when using this method. Collaborative activities often have several goals--individual learning on the part of each student, the successful functioning of a team, and a collaborative product that may be measured against diverse criteria. In other words, one reason why it is difficult to evaluate collaboration is that you must examine the process as well as the product of the group's work. Usually, long-term collaborative activities finish with a product created by all of the members of the team. In such a group project, how is individual work to be evaluated? Alternatively, the group process may end with each student turning in an individual assignment to be graded. In such cases, how can a teacher assess the success of the group? No matter what kind of project the students create, evaluation works best when it takes into account both product and process.

The most obvious thing to evaluate when grading a collaborative project is the final product. In some activities, students work as a group while projects are graded individually. For example, a group of students in a landscape architecture class might work as a group to create a design for a garden in a public space on campus. Such a project would require the team to research the public's needs, the existing vegetation, and the feasibility for changes within a certain budget and time frame. The final product would include a design for the garden and a document addressing the issues researched by the students. One way to grade this project on an individual basis would be for the group to divide the work into identifiable sections and for each member to be responsible for one section. For instance, one student would research the possibilities and limitations of the space, another would write the report, and yet another would draw the design. Instead of grading the project as a unified whole, the teacher would evaluate each section and assign individual grades to each student. This type of project can have some drawbacks, as the final product may be disjointed and uneven, and the teacher may find it difficult to evaluate each individual part for a separate grade--particularly if some students were responsible only for research rather than for writing or drawing. Another way to assign individual grades to a final product would be for the students to work as a group in the researching and planning stages, with each student then turning in his or her own design for the garden. The group would function as a common resource as the students worked on their designs, but each student would be graded on an individual "final product."

However, most long-term collaborative projects finish with each group turning in one document, design, or model that represents the collective work of the entire group--and is graded as such. In the example above, group members would work together at each level of the assignment, researching and writing together, and the final design and document would represent the work of a team rather than a group of individual workers. The teacher would then grade the design and the document as a single product, assigning the same grade for the final product to each member of the team--although individual grades might change when each student's contribution to the group process is taken into account. This type of project tends to capture the ideal of collaboration more effectively than individually graded projects, because each member of the team feels responsible for every part of the assignment. Whether the group's product is evaluated on an individual or a collective basis, however, a collaborative project is much more than the final document. Usually, one basic objective for such a project is that students learn to work as team members. How can you measure whether each student has achieved this objective? As anyone who has ever worked on a group project realizes, a successful final product does not necessarily mean that the group functioned as a team and that each member contributed equally to the work. In response to this characteristic of groups, teachers who employ collaborative activities have created several methods of evaluating group process and determining whether each student demonstrated personal accountability for the project. As is true with all other teaching methods, the best results will generally be obtained by using multiple assessments throughout the project, rather than focusing only on a single evaluation at the end.

One way of assessing the effectiveness of the groups is to monitor and observe the members' interactions as they work together. Observation gives you an understanding of the quality of each group's interaction and their progress on the assignment. This kind of observation can take place in the classroom, if groups are working together in class, or through group progress reports and updates turned in during the project. When observing in class, you can look for signs of productive group work--attentive listening, serious discussion, and progress toward a shared goal with input from each member of the group. Another informal way some teachers observe their students in collaboration is by having the teams use e-mail to communicate progress, plans and decisions as they conduct their project, and by asking students to send copies of these procedural messages to the teacher's e-mail address. This allows the teacher to observe unobtrusively the interaction of the group. Finally, some teachers use periodical progress reports to monitor their groups. When they read the reports, they check that the group is following a work plan and making progress together toward a specific goal. Progress reports are useful because they encourage students to reflect on the effectiveness of their group throughout the project, and to articulate plans for completing the assignment. For example, many teachers ask their students to complete weekly progress reports describing the tasks that each group member has completed, outlining the tasks to be completed in the next week, and confidentially commenting on each group member's contributions. Two or three required progress reports turned in during a long-term group project can help you assess how well groups are achieving the objectives of the assignment.

Although observation can provide some insight on group effectiveness and individual performance, it works best when used in conjunction with detailed feedback from the group members themselves. Since the members of the teams are best equipped to assess their teammates' and their own contributions to the project, many teachers now include their students' voices in the final evaluation process. For example, both David Meredith (Engineering) and Larry Spence (Political Science) have reported good results from using a simple point system for evaluating individual contributions to the group. Meredith tells us that he asks each student to "allocate a fixed number of points (say twenty) among the rest of the team members. The values are averaged for each student, and form a weighting factor for the final team project score." Many teachers elaborate on this idea by asking students to complete peer assessment forms when the project is complete. These forms generally include a point system similar to the one described above, and spaces for confidential comments about the contribution of each group member. Usually, the student is asked to include a self-assessment on the form, so that the teacher may understand how the student perceives his or her own contribution to the group in relation to that of other members. Robert Melton (Aerospace Engineering) requires students to complete a form that asks about the dependability, accuracy, and value of each team member's contribution to the project. In addition, the students assign a numerical rank and qualitative assessment to the contributions of each group member--including themselves. Likewise, Kathryn Dansky (Health Policy and Administration) asks students to assign numerical scores to each team member (including themselves) in five major areas: leadership, cooperation, communication, work ethic, and quality of work.

Finally, these student assessments of group process and individual contribution can be combined with your evaluation of the team's product to determine each student's final project grade. In your calculations you will weight the two scores according to the objectives of the assignment, but in general, peer assessment tends to determine from 5% to 30% of the project grade. In cases where successful group process is as important an objective as is the product, the two scores might be weighted equally. Whichever method you choose, inform the students of the grading policy at the start of the project, so that your expectations for the assignment are clear. Grading collaborative activities is always challenging, but with peer assessment, individual performance can be rewarded while each student's grade still depends largely on the success of the entire group.

In what ways can technology support the goals of collaborative learning?--Just as technology can serve the lecture and discussion methods of teaching, it can also be used as a tool to address some of the challenges presented by collaborative activities. Many of the uses of technology for group projects work well in any discipline, and are simple to plan and implement. For example, assigning periodic group progress reports to be submitted by e-mail is an easy way to keep up with each group's project, and your e-mail response can be sent to each team member. E-mail also simplifies out-of-class communication within the groups, since students often use it to exchange ideas and set up meetings. This idea is taken a step farther in the English department, where students writing collaboratively provide feedback on each other's writing using CommonSpace, a communication and feedback software. Because the students' comments appear in separate columns set up for each writer, this software facilitates collaborative writing by bringing together feedback from each group member onto one draft, without losing track of the source of each response. In addition, the software converts documents from different word-processing programs and operating systems, allowing drafts and feedback to be sent quickly and easily to group members as e-mail attachments. The use of e-mail progress reports and collaborative writing software also prepares graduates for their entry to the workplace, where such tools are increasingly being used to support collaboration and communication.

Other teachers have used technology by creating World Wide Web sites that serve as resources for students working on collaborative projects. One excellent example of this idea is the Engineering Design and Graphics 100 Web site, created and maintained by Dhushy Sathianathan (Engineering Design and Graphics). This award-winning site combines resources for the course's collaborative design assignments, space for the student Web sites which are a requirement of each group project, and links to the Web sites of all the teachers of ED&G 100. As resources for design projects, Sathianathan has included an outline of the engineering design process, guidelines for the reports students will complete, and several project management and assessment tools. These tools, along with the class itself, help students identify and develop the skills needed to form an effective team. The site supports students as they learn to plan and run a productive meeting, use action plans and progress reports, and perform self-assessment to track the progress of the team. Such management tools help to address many of the challenges of collaboration, such as learning to work in groups and communicating in ways that defuse potential group conflicts. Sathianathan's site also includes assessment and evaluation forms that students use to evaluate the contributions made by their teammates and themselves. Past and present student projects make the site as dynamic as it is helpful.

The ED&G 100 site clearly shows the critical role of students in the collaborative classroom. Indeed, with or without the tools of technology, the true strength of collaborative methods is that they allow students to work together to build their individual skills. When students learn through discussion and exploration, they establish ownership of the material.

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